The House on the Border

The twentieth century through the history of a family of La Cerdanya.


The house in the border is an establishment located in Puigcerdà, very close to the border with France. Since 1892, when a married couple bought it to set up a guesthouse, the house belongs to the Grau family.

The day of her retirement, while switching off the refrigerators and lamps for the last time, Carme goes over her ancestor’s lives and remembers without any trace of nostalgia, the history of this border’s house.

It’s been a place of passage, where many destinies have crossed –travelers, fugitives or exiled. In the middle of an imposing landscape, the house of the border has witnessed some of the most important episodes that have transformed the area, La Cerdanya, and the whole country since the nineteenth century until now: from the last Carlist uprising, the Tragic Week to the Civil War, the post-war misery and the rise of tourism.

With an evocative historical framework, The House on the Border switches between past and present, reality and fiction. Rafael Vallbona has written a fresco of the twentieth century, a choral novel that passes on the reader the intrigue and majesty of a land that has left its mark on history.


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